The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is the only book I have read of his. I recall getting a bit judgemental in spite of myself...to be completely honest the characters and plot are not seared in my memory. To be fair, few characters are: so do not view that as a criticism.

I cannot promise reverence in my reading - only that I am respectful almost always in my reviews. Perhaps the following is not reflected in my blog but I am an emotional reader - I get irritated easily and my semantic anticipation tends to dominate with some books.

But I will add The Captain and The Enemy to my list.

After Winton, having hopefully got ahead of schedule I will take on Borges.

Marquez, you mean? Reading Borges is highly recommended and I think right up your street, so also a good idea. I kinda wish you had chosen Love in a time of cholera, but 100 years... is pure magic too.

I'm going to respectfully differ from Kokiri on Greene, who I adore. Kokiri, I read Snow Crash and liked it, and my gf read Anathem and Cryptonomicon (is that his?) and she liked them, but although I quite liked the conceit, I just found it so slow I couldn't bear with it. Maybe one to revisit.

I started one of the Baroque Cycle novels, I forget the title, and just got bored and moved on to something else within 3 chapters or so. It's still in my to read pile, but it's been there a while wight ever getting my interest up.

I recall thinking I would have preferred 100 Years Of Solitude had it been ~75 years.

Ha ha. I would have preferred it to be 1000 years. But I suppose you have to allow yourself to get swept away to feel that.

Yes, my mistake. G.G. Marquez.

MB:
Believe me - and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools - we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emanicipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.

What do you think about this quote from #143 that Woolf cited in A Room of One's Own?

Is Literature always a preserve of the middle-class and up or do you think it is possible, desirable in a 'good' society for any of us to be able to access the intellectual freedom of great writing?

In my brief experience in some of the most challenged schools of Sydney, there is a vast gulf between that reality and the composition and production of culturally influential texts.

I was a poor child in England, but things had moved on from Woolf's day, so I don't know what I can sensibly say about it.

I think poor children can gain access to great literature but are very unlikely to have the intellectual freedom to give birth to any, or much hope of access to the means of sharing it with the world.

I can't really do this justice on a phone, but I'm not really sure what she's exactly worried about. There's a bit of circularity to the question - what do we mean by literature? If the middle classes are the judges of what constitutes great writing then ... Do folk tales only become literature when interpreted by the Grimms?

See also john Maynard Keynes' essay on wealth and leisure, since i think he also mixed in the same circles.

Structural influence on form.

I was reminded of the impact of form upon narrative expression by an experience that I had just very recently.
bob_124 - a contributor to 2+2 who, until minutes ago, apparently also has the bug to write about literature and a fellow lover of Dostoyevsky - also has a thread here on 2+2.
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...r-u-s-1334833/

I was reading one of his reviews this morning and it struck me the similiarities between some of his posts and my posts. Although his writing style is far more polished, there were more many similarites between some of his posts and mine. I had no idea his thread existed - and yet I saw very similar posts.

Structural form of the "post", narrative mode of the blog/review?

Thoughts?

You may consider my attitude to life amoral but I hold firm to only one maxim.
I am a lifelong learner. As such my goal is to learn one new thing every day.

I have somewhat of a creeky morality system which sometimes involves believing thngs that I do not live by and holding others to standards differently to those of myself.
I am honest enough with myself but avoid brutal honesty lately because I believe not all self-reflection is helpful.
But I am honest enough with myself to know that I am a hypocite. I also believe that most everyone else lives under the illusion that they are not.
Which is largely why when I try to understand another person point of view - often I am left confused and befuddled. There are a handful or less people that I think I know but I do not carry that thought with too much weight.
However, concluding that I must therefore live in a perpetual state of suprise is also not true. I expect to not understand and so more often than not this befuddlement is met with a shrug.

I hope that gives some insight to the voice behind these posts. Yes, I am not writing and posting just for my own emotional purposes - I am writing toward someone. But I hope you view these posts not as me, Diggerteacher talking down to you, but that you view each post as an opportunity to explore and find out something new today.

Which is why I am in my current quandry? That particular, familiar funk that maybe you have as well. I feel like I have learnt nothing new - or nothing that I feel worthy of one of those very few days (what 10000) I have left in this mortal coil. So where to look, what to do?

p.s. Halfway through In the Winter Dark, in spite of getting my first days work of the school year (yay abject poverty one small step further away).

Wish me luck in my search for today's nugget.

Dreams

Dreams are but interludes which Fancy makes;
When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes:
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,
A mob of cobblers, and a court of kings:
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad;
Both are the reasonable soul run mad;
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things long cast behind
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.
The nurse's legends are for truths received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed.
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
The night restores our actions done by day;
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey.
In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece,
Chimeras all; and more absurd, or less.

Sir John Dryden

John Dryden (19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made Poet Laureate in 1668.[1] He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John."


Portrait of Sir John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller. There are other portraits of Sir John, however I choose this one because it did not have the high status wigs and as stylised posture that we see in 'official portraits' of the time e.g. Kneller's portrait of Joseph Addison in my #117. I think we get a closer feel for the Rembrandt school with this piece.


I have mentioned before that Imperial capitals are the centre of cultural production in European history. London appears to be producing alot of literary cultural artefacts, Rembrandt and painting in the Dutch Imperial centre and, of course, one of the other large Imperial capitals of the late 17th early 18th centuries was Vienna. Music appeared to be its choice of forms for high cultural production.

We are on the cusp of the grand European Enlightenment and the 18th century but not quite there. This is the age of the Counter-Reformation as European obscurantists' wanted to put Luther back into his box. Before the 'classical musical period of Vienna', we lived in the world of Leopold I and his Italian court musician Bertali..



Antonio Bertali (probably March 1605 – 17 April 1669) was an Italian composer and violinist of the Baroque era.

He was born in Verona and received early music education there from Stefano Bernardi. Probably from 1624, he was employed as court musician in Vienna by Emperor Ferdinand II. In 1649 Bertali succeeded Giovanni Valentini as court Kapellmeister. He died in Vienna in 1669 and was succeeded in his post by Giovanni Felice Sances.


His Patron's full title

Leopold I, by the grace of God elected Holy Roman Emperor, forever August, King of Germany, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Rama, Serbia, Galicia, Lodomeria, Cumania, Bulgaria, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Luxemburg, of the Higher and Lower Silesia, of Württemberg and Teck, Prince of Swabia, Count of Habsburg, Tyrol, Kyburg and Goritia, Landgrave of Alsace, Marquess of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgovia, the Enns, the Higher and Lower Lusace, Lord of the Marquisate of Slavonia, of Port Naon and Salines, etc. etc.


Artist (not cited)
Leopold I (name in full: Leopold Ignaz Joseph Balthasar Felician; Hungarian: I. Lipót; 9 June 1640 – 5 May 1705) was Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary and Croatia and King of Bohemia.


Even today, great centres of power produce and proliferate the high-cultures we live in the shadow of??

In the Winter Dark By Tim Winton

Grope and stumble your way through the darkness of pained dreams and the scrarring memories of the broken characters of Winton's In the Winter Dark. Winton allows the imagination of his reader to run riot with strong plot pacing and bare, allusive characterisation that allows readers to create their own fears and back stories into the void. Whilst neither a particularly shocking nor suprising an ending, given the pathos and tragedy that oozes out of every scene, the exact nature of the ending caught me off guard. Kudos if you see this one coming. I am actually becoming quite a fan of these novellas and their size, this one being 155 pages - seems to be just right.

8/10

Next cab off the rank...

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

We are leaving the Anglospere and entering post-colonial Latin American literature of the 20th century. Light background reading has GG Marquez's genre of writing as magical realism. Given that allegories apparently inform a good deal of the novel, I shall be doing some research on Colombian history and some key events. I am not sure they will have any relevance to the narrative but, well they might and anyway learning more of Colombian history should be worth it for its own sake.

Even though, we are well and truly in the photographic era, I like seeing artists interpreting artists...

Sketch of a Portrait of Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Armando Morales

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Spanish pronunciation: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes] audio (help·info); born March 6, 1927[1]) is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest living recipient.1 He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.



Search Colombian traditional music...for immersion purposes.

Questionable image.

Juan de la Cosa or sometimes Juan the Biscayan (c. 1450–1510) was a Spanish navigator and cartographer, known for designing the earliest European world map that incorporated the territories of the Americas that were discovered in the 15th century. De la Cosa played an important role in the first and second voyage of Christopher Columbus to the West Indies, since he was the owner and captain of the Santa María.

In 1499, he served as the chief pilot in the expedition of Alonso de Ojeda to the coasts of South America. Upon his return to Andalusia, he drew his famous mappa mundi ("world map") and soon returned to the Indies, this time with Rodrigo de Bastidas. In the following years, De la Cosa alternated trips to America under its own command with special duties from the Crown, including an assignment as a spy in Lisbon and participation in the board of pilots held in Burgos in 1508. In 1509, he began what would be his last expedition, again with Ojeda, to take possession of the coasts of modern Colombia. De la Cosa died in an armed confrontation with indigenous people before he could get possession of Urabá.


Mappa mundi: concept of a world map in the medieval world - De La Cosa has a famous one dating to 1506.
The new world is the green section.



The colonisation of Colombia through De La Cosa and his fellow Spaniards came through the Bay of Paria - which is situated between Trinidad and modern-day Venezuala. Perhaps the most important colonial city of the bay is Trinidad's capital Port of Spain.

The expansion of the Spanish in South America really accelerated under Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Within his court was a giant of European culture, "The Sun among the Stars", Titian. According to Spaniards, his 'ne plus ultra' work is pictured below, (plus ultra is the Spanish motto):


Titian/The Prado (Madrid)
Charles V on Horseback at Mühlberg, Titian, 1548, Oil on canvas, 335cm. Emperor Carlos V on Horseback, Titian, 1548, Oil on canvas, 335cm x 283cm.

Note the pose: King on horseback with the front hooves raised, as if posed to gallop. We saw an iteration of that with one of the many Russian bronzes in St Petersburg of their Tsars. Clearly, important symbology within the representation of Imperial power.

https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/

Charles V (German: Karl V.; Spanish: Carlos I; Croatian: Karlo V.; Dutch: Karel V; Italian: Carlo V; Czech: Karel V.; French: Charles Quint; 24 February 1500 – 21 September 1558) was ruler of the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 and, as Charles I, of the Spanish Empire from 1516 until his voluntary retirement and abdication in favor of his younger brother Ferdinand I as Holy Roman Emperor and his son Philip II as King of Spain in 1556.

As the ruler of many greater and lesser European states, Charles had a very complicated coat of arms. He was the heir of three of Europe's leading dynasties, the House of Habsburg of the Habsburg Monarchy, the House of Valois-Burgundy of the Burgundian Netherlands, and the House of Trastámara of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. He ruled over extensive domains in Central, Western, and Southern Europe, and the Spanish colonies in the Americas and Asia. As Charles was the first king to rule Castile, León, and Aragon simultaneously in his own right, he became the first King of Spain.[3] In 1519, Charles became Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria. From that point forward, his empire spanned nearly four million square kilometers across Europe, the Far East, and the Americas





Ponder - how we do not hold a figure like this within our main narratives of Europe? I do not know much about him - he was never a figure offered in my education to be examined.

Hopefully I will remember to look at Titian later.

Alongside the Catholic Church - it will be the world, culture and views of Charles V and his followers which will provide the basis for the world of the visions of Marquez.

I had more comments but this is the 3rd time I have lost this post to IE/2+2/myISP losing the comment in a dropout.

Remind me to look at Titian - if I forget later.

"Wallah, sir"

I swear to God.

Although I have no basis for this assertion, some of you might have been sceptical or confused when I said - often I'm left confused by what other people's perspectives are or appear to be.
Yes I understand that by affirming your position to a higher authority, indeed a sacred authority, that you are saying that I should believe your prior testimony about say.....your conduct, your story.

Here is the part I do not understand - I do not understand the connection between sincerity and versacity. I understand the connection between the use of sincerity and believability but not that and 'truth' (although my understanding of truth is probably different to most).

Conviction and the strength of belief is a metric by which alot of people organise their conception of the world. That you hold something to be incontrovertible is often held up to me as something that I should too take seriously. I believe that I am not particularly dismissive or self-orientated in my belief contructs from many others and , as such, I do not want you to think that I am being off-handed or too self superior - when I say I do not understand why you think having a strength of conviction should change mine. Again, I am not saying I am unfamiliar or do not experience this affectation myself - I just put it to one side, or try to, as much as possible and I certainly do not want you to rely upon it when I put forward an opinion.

"Wallah, I dont!"

Origins of God?

One element of my current theory of the origin of God involves the phenomenology of dreams. We experience dreams, in most of our encounters, and conceive them to be in place of and or with an origin from distinct from our usually encounter with 'reality'. Given that a large amount of our actual encounter with existence involves being in this 'state' - it is perhaps not suprising that we assign a metaphysical distinction to the dream-experience and make it a different 'state' of being-in-the-world.
I belief that it is possible that within our primordial discourses about dreams that we conceived of a hierarchy of existence to this type of experience from that of our non-sleep encounter with the world. It is understandable, images of the world but not exact and precise as out other encounter, it appears to be temporal but in a different way and it can be affective in very powerful ways.

I think that this might be part of the explanation for the origin of God, although I do not think it is complete. Clearly, the anthropological theories that connect the conception of the divine to deal with unexplained events in a 'brain' predisposed to assign agency is also a very powerful construct. Nonetheless, I think my little pet theory has some merit given it does have some features that connect to transcendental and revelatory claims of the faithful.


Marquez's passage on dreams/ insomnia p 44

"If we don't sleep again, so much the better." Jose Arcadio Buendia said in good humour. " That way we can get more out of life." But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsom part of the sickness of insomnia was the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to this state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past."



From Puccini's Turandot:

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (Italian: [ˈdʒaːkomo putˈtʃiːni]; 22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924), generally known as Giacomo Puccini, was an Italian composer whose operas are among the important operas played as standards.[n 1]

Puccini has been called "the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi".[1] While his early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera, he successfully developed his work in the 'realistic' verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.



The Puccini family was established in Lucca as a local musical dynasty by Puccini's great-great grandfather – also named Giacomo (1712–1781).[2][3] This first Giacomo Puccini was maestro di cappella * of the Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca.

*(Classical Music) a person in charge of an orchestra, esp a private one attached to the palace of a prince in Italy during the baroque period


Ultimately, however it was not one patron - like artists of another age but commercial publishers that enable Puccini to develop his art. I am not sure if Puccini was the first, but we are firmly in a new era in the culture of Art where commercial popularity sustains some artists.

"Adoration of the Shepherd" - ADORACIÓN DE LOS PASTORES
by El Greco 1614 Held in The Prado

El Greco, born Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541 – 7 April 1614), was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname,[a][b] a reference to his national Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), often adding the word Κρής (Krēs, "Cretan").

El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the center of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before travelling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done.[2] In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings.


Colombian iteration: of High Culture in the 17th Century


ADORACIÓN DE LOS PASTORES,
By Gregorio Vásquez de Arce y Ceballos

Gregorio Vasquez de Arce y Ceballos (May 9, 1638 – August 6, 1711), commonly referred to as Gregorio Vasquez, was a Colombian painter, including the Quitenian Miguel de Santiago, was one of the leading artist in the Latin American Baroque movement, which extended from the mid 17th to the late 18th century in the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Most of the artwork of Vázquez depicts the life of Christ, Virgin Mary, the Saints and scenes of the New Testament.

As fewer words to surround the pre-eminent jewel of the Spanish Golden Age.



Las Meninas, Diego Velazquez (1656)
318 cm × 276 cm

The Prado, Madrid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Meninas

Again, I will return to D. Velasquez.

Courtesy of the wiki.

Antonio de Cabezón (30 March 1510 – 26 March 1566) was a Spanish Renaissance composer and organist. Blind from childhood, he quickly rose to prominence as performer and was eventually employed by the royal family. He was among the most important composers of his time and the first major Iberian keyboard composer.

A few of Cabezón's works appeared in print during his lifetime in Venegas de Henestrosa's compilation Libro de cifra nueva (Alcalá de Henares, 1557). However, the majority of his compositions were published posthumously by his son Hernando in a volume titled Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela (Madrid, 1578). Together these collections contain some 275 pieces, most for organ or other keyboard instruments. Cabezón also composed instrumental music for plucked string instruments and ensembles, and vocal music, but only a single vocal piece survives: Invocación a la letanía, in the Cancionero de la Casa de Medinaceli. A mention of a mass by Cabezón is contained in a 1611 inventory of music from Cuenca Cathedral, but the actual music is lost, as are, presumably, many other works by the composer.

* Isabella, Charles V consort - was Cabezon's patron. There is a Titian portrait of her that you can find on his wiki.


Whilst beautiful music, I think it is fair to say that the musical legacy of the Spanish was not as strong as other modes.

If you are interested in a bit more extensive immersion in Baroque Spanish music and you like guitar instead of pipe music. I am but part way through this tube but it keeps the mind relaxed and aware.
Click the link below..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepAWlgqt2w

Reading the first 80 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude - a shadow cannot helped be noticed over this work. And indeed, being in the shadow of this work is not a criticism, but the figure of the comical Lord of La Mancha looms in every fantastical thought and magical, imaginative flourish of Marquez and his characters.
Also, of the very little I know of Colonial Spanish life, the 'blood' fixation and racialism of the Colonial upper class might be symbolically represented, or rather satirised, in the fixation of Ursula with 'incest'. The book is growing on me as I read, although my frantic attempts to familiarise myself with Spanish culture and the Spanish 'New World' might not be enough for I sense that I am missing alot of the intertextual and allegorical possibilities.

I have my philosophical understandings of the world. They have swung dramatically in the last 25 years, from age 15 I was given Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, from passionate teenage leftist - to swinging to a moderate social, political pragmatist to not really caring at all for anything philosophical to loving Heidegger and Levinas phenemonology --> to encountering Foucault. To now, trying to refuse being placed in a box for anything.

One thing that has always jarred up against any of my views and which I think has inadequately been accounted for : which is the experience of the mentally ill. This becomes particularly urgent when you do not dismiss it with a wave of exclusion of 'objectivity' and the irrational as defective.


Do you think knowing that Goya was possibly at the height of a psychic crisis when he painted the piece below, affects your interpretation of his work?






Yard with Lunatics, 1794. Oil on tin-plated iron, 43.8 x 32.7 cm


Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish: [fɾanˈθisko xoˈse ðe ˈɣoʝa i luˈθjentes]; 30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was court painter to the Spanish Crown; throughout the Peninsular War he remained in Madrid, where he painted the portrait of Joseph Bonaparte, pretender to the Spanish throne, and documented the war in the masterpiece of studied ambiguity known as the Desastres de la Guerra.[1] Through his works he was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of artists of later generations, notably Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon

If Velazquez's work observes, challenges and resists, with a superb, subtle irony, the purpose of his position through the structural position (court painter) and perspective in his Las Meninas, which enables him to reduce his supposed audience* (the King and Queen) and to rise above his setting to gaze directly at his fellow artists. Then, Goya drags his audience towards the shunned, those that we refuse to examine and allows just enough light for observation of the complex variants of mental illness in Yard with Lunatics.
Although very different in sensibility, the capacity to capture our encounter with perspectivism and bring it forth with a subtle and light touch - mark both artists as being crucial in the development of modernist and post-modernist movements that lie well into the future of Art.

I am always enchanted and dazzled when seeing their work.


* Audience - should be read to mean 'intended viewer' - as V's patron the artist is, ostensibly, painting for the King and Queen - but Velazquez is clearly challenging that idea - he is looking directly at the viewer (which is usually interpreted as the Queen) but he is also looking at the perspective of where he would be viewing the work. As such, it could be interpreted, that the painting's real purpose is a meditation on perspective and the perspectivism of the artist.

If you are interested in interpretation of Velzaquez's Las Meninas click through the link.

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farbera...s_meninas.html


Apparently, according historical accounts within Phillip's IV court, the two pictures that are faintly above the mirrored image of the King and Queen are two pieces of Peter Paul Ruben's Series on Ovid's Metamorpheses.

The Left


Minerva Punishing Arachne P.P. Rubens

The Right


Apollo's Victory over Marsyas P.P. Rubens


Wiki of the myths
Arachne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne
Marsyas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsyas


The more you dig - the more you find.

Rebeca - the indigenous girl in the first story of One Hundred Years in Solitude under great stress reverts to eating soil.

I am open to readers' thoughts on what this might mean.
The term used for this behaviour is geophagy.

Geophagy is the practice of eating earthy or soil-like substances such as clay, and chalk. It exists in animals in the wild and also in humans, most often in rural or preindustrial societies among children and pregnant women.[1] Human geophagy may be related to pica, a classified eating disorder in the DSM-IV characterized by abnormal cravings for nonfood items.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophagy

Goya and Madness


Goya (untitled)

Another famous madman....Vincent

Is this a representation of madness?




Van Gogh Self Portrait Jan 1889


Self-harm has always been strongly identified with madness.

Van Gogh Jan 1889

Does the pre-occupation of Vincent on self-portraits tell us anything about madness and self-awareness?


Madness stalks Marquez's text, everyone seems slightly off - more often the men - with more modern feminine archetypes of sensible, grounded women trying to restrain the wilder notions of their men.


What does it mean to be mad?

Our society seem to be spreading and stretching the idea...for sometimes noble and sometimes banal motives.